The Art of Disappearing

Over the last five years, I have dedicated an enormous amount of time to helping start a nonprofit in the Middle East as well as the Anabaptist Perspectives podcast. These have been some of the most significant and rewarding things I have ever done.

But at the same time, we are not designed to constantly be working and building the visions we have. Since 2016, I have never taken a sustained break from this work, telling myself I loved what I was doing and didn’t need it. And in a way this was true.

But one day I realized that if I cared about my craft, one critical element missing was time to rest and reflect. If we constantly maintain a breakneck speed, we slowly lose efficiency and passion for the work we have made for ourselves. And one day we wake up and realize we just don’t enjoy it like we used to.

That was me. This spring, I came to see I needed a solid break from my work. No, it was nothing dramatic like a mental breakdown or a panic attack. It was much more subtle. It was the constant nagging in the back of my mind that I was tired, and not only in the way that simply getting more sleep would fix. Tasks once effortless now seemed to take so much energy. At first I tried what I always do when faced with a challenge: try harder and push through. While this worked temporarily, this response only more clearly showed that trying harder was not a solution; these feelings weren’t going anywhere.

The human body and mind are incredible, but there are limits to how long we can maintain an intense schedule. There is a finite limit to how many flights you can take, how many nights of 5 hours of sleep you can do, how many meetings you can attend while still being at the top of your game. Slowly, the mind realizes you are not mentally as quick as before. Decisions that were once uncomplicated and routine are now pressing and stressful. Meetings become a burden instead of exciting times of working with your team to accomplish meaningful goals.

And the strenuous element is that in the core of your being you still wholeheartedly believe in the work you have built. You still love your task and the team members you interact with. Why, we ask ourselves, do I feel this way?

These were all things building up inside of me during this year (2021). Fortunately, I have a great team and they were helpful in giving me the space to analyze just what was going on in my life. I am so grateful I noticed these signs of something being “off” before I impacted into the concrete wall of burnout. Instead, I realized that for my life to be more sustainable I need to build systems and processes for doing tasks that didn’t cause operations to always bottleneck with me. Before this, so many aspects of both organizations I am part of were solely up to me; there was never a time that I could step away and have a break. While in the short term this can work, after years of this the toil was certainly being felt.

And so we went to work setting things up with the goal that I would be able to leave operations for a full month while things continued without me. I wanted to completely disappear for that entire time: no meetings or emails, and no way of people contacting me. The timing of it being a month is important (a concept from Tim Ferris’ book The Four Hour Workweek); if it is only a week or two the tendency is for people to let things pile up until you are back. Instead, the goal was to be gone long enough that the team couldn’t put tasks off but instead had to deal with them in my absence.

And so that is what Trish (my wife) and I did. We completely went off-grid for the month of August 2021. We spent a glorious week at home, working on the thousand little things that remained incomplete in our personal lives. Then we spend a week with her family in Kansas and, the best part, two weeks exploring Vienna, Austria, and the Alps. It was absolutely incredible. I was finally able to go back to the things Trish and I enjoy: exploring new places and people, making videos for the fun of it, and taking a ridiculous amount of photos. It was lovely. (The videos are in this playlist on my YouTube channel, and photos are on this website and social media.)

So that is what I learned. I am still processing all we experienced, and I have a feeling I’ll be revisiting this topic again soon.